Hubble bauble, angels in space.

Anthropomorphic astronomy, what could be more prescient for a Christmas Eve.  Except for the fact that I don’t have any personal attachment to the Christmas Story of stars , stables, and the son of God.  This does nevertheless, make me go WoW!   And although I have fallen out with the  doctrines of man made religion, I still do wonder at a spirit that is embodied in all living creatures,  I still marvel at the amazingness of earth , and space, and all we know nothing about.  I still believe, but what it is I believe in, I cannot tell you.  A spirit of creativity,  of transformation, a spirit of the magic that is life.  How we are all greater than the sum of our parts. True of humans, true of nations, true of stars.  A spirit that embodies generosity, and collaboration and surprise.

Sylvia Plath represents here a little of my own wary spirit.  She wants to be open to transcendence, but is fearful, even cynical at times. And yet recognises its potency, in unexpected, unfamiliar settings. Just excellent.  Completely set apart from the over sentimental expression of angels we see everywhere.

 

Black Rook in Rainy Weather
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain-
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then —
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical
Yet politic, ignorant

Of whatever angel any choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur.
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance
Miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent.

 
— Sylvia Plath

A wandering , a wondering.

 

 

Brilliant what you can find when you go looking for it!! Your Paintings is a website which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country.

This is a veritable feast for anyone who enjoys learning about the past, by exploring the art of painters seeing and expressing themselves through paint. It is a project of awesome dimension, and I warn you, it is addictive.  I particularly like the guided tours, that are a wonderful starting block to wandering around the site .

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/guidedtours/james-fox

It houses famous painters, as well as amateur painters, and there are thousands  of paintings to discover. I have been reacquainted with an artist who was commissioned by my mother to paint two paintings of Derbyshire in the 1970’s as a gift to her then husband, my father.  This artist, John Spence was a friend of theirs, and was generous enough to share some of his time with me, then a teenager,  in love with the drama and the passion that can be created and expressed by the creative artist.  He took myself and my closest friend on an amazing exploration of old Nottingham, the Lace Market, one dusk, and opened our eyes to the opportunity of seeing stories and visions in ordinary places. The evening ended on on a high note, when we went back to a friend of his, who had created a fairytale adventure of magic in his third floor of an old Victorian house. It was like entering into a grotto, containing excitement and trepidation, not knowing what would appear before you.  I have never forgotten it, and it has advised my life.  It showed me how to remain vigilant to what is around me, to retain the magic of surprise, to enjoy curiosity.  I loved the evening , and I loved the man, for introducing  me so spectacularly to the excitement that art can bring.  My father divorced, took the paintings, and I never saw them again.  I asked once, but was not encouraged to dig deeper. I know he didn’t hang them in his home with his new wife.  I miss them, would have liked to have them hung in my home, as a memory of the family when it had some sense of unity, as they shared a love of Derbyshire, and the paintings represented it beautifully. Who knows?  Maybe one day , they will appear on this site, and I will be able to reacquaint myself with them.  I know John doesn’t know where they went, because I have asked him!!  He has an interesting website that you may want to visit too.http://johnspence.org/

This is one of Johns paintings on the  BBC site . The Secret Hour.

I hope you spend some time enjoying what the BBC and their partners have put together here, it is truly a magical find.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/yourpaintings/2011/12/over-half-of-the-nations-colle.shtml#jump_more

Magic and mystery, mystery and magic.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

— William Butler Yeats

Yeats uses classic Greek mythology and ancient celtic faerie symbolism to illustrate a man’s desire to always be searching First, he finds the hazel wood, then
he finds the switch and berries to make a fishing rod and bait with which to catch a fish. When the fish is caught, it turns into something more spiritual to
him as he is preparing the fire on which to cook it, the desire for the feminine influence. The reference to the apples may be a symbol of eternity, day after
day (sun after sun) and night after night (moon after moon). But notice, he never acquires the faerie woman. Instead, he is on a quest to find her. That
journey is what keeps man happy — a purpose.The faerie is a symbol of purpose to man. Purpose keeps him going.

The imagery is magically powerful. an expression of the longing, seeking, questing that characterizes many of our lives. we seek and need: the fruit of both
realms–the direct and the reflected, the masculine and the feminine, the tangible and the spirit.In our youth, we live in a world of discovery, magic and love.
In our later years, we long to return to that irretrievable time of magic again.His poem is about the human condition. We are constantly in pursuit of the
unknown — we desire to explain the unexplainable and understand the incomprehensible. If you find this poem moves you and you don’t understand why, it
is because this poem speaks to our deepest desire to know what we cannot know.

Curioser and Curiouser.

 

Well what do you know???

I was wondering what Einstein would be considering, if he could have been involved with the treasure hunt at CERN for the elusive Higgs Bosun particle, aka ‘The God Particle’. What I have been reading about Einstein pleases me. I love his curiosity, his marvel in the complexity of the universe in which we live. I love the humility with which he accepts the limitations of human understanding yet marries it with an intellectual rigour and a drive to discover . I love the way he doesn’t mind being wrong. And I share his view of the cosmos having a spiritual dimension which is unknowable.
In his lecture at Einstein’s memorial, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of him as a person: “He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness . . . There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn.”  I can’t help wishing I had met him, perhaps walking the dog. There we would be, chatting and exchanging views on this and that, and recognising in each other some common thread of spirit.
A man born into a Jewish family, non-practising, who was more influenced by Catholicism, but matures into someone who accepts a religiosity, but not a creed. The philosophy of religion and the quest for spiritual truth preoccupied Albert Einstein–so much that it has been said “one might suspect he was a disguised theologian.”

I share with him the sense of awe over the majesty of the universe and the sense that its workings is all the “religion” needed by our species. He required no formal institutions, no religious acts other than being true to his intellectual curiosity, had no missionary zeal to convert others to his position, and was without a personal need for immortality. He found it impossible not to think of himself as religious in the sense of humility and awe at the mystery, rationality and complexity of nature, considering “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
Whilst I am amazed and impressed with the findings modern scientists are claiming, I return to Einsteins thought “I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one ?” I find it inconceivable that once this particle unravels our current understanding of physics, and propels us into new, unimagined possibilites, we will not be left with the constant dilemnas we all face, -How do I live, What do I believe, Who am I? For me, Einstein hits the nail on the head when he tells us “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” However much we learn about the machinery of the world, and of the universe, it remains for the individual to discover their own value within it. He takes me back to the ideas I blogged about concerning left brained thinking, in which we discover that analysis alone will never progress human thinking . The mystery of the universe refuses to be merely dissected to be understood, as “The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.”(Interview with Rabindranath Tagore (14 April 1930) Perhaps we need to learn how to listen to the music.

If you want to know more about the latest scientific discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider, start here: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html

 

Turkeys at Christmas, and I’m not talking cooking here.

There’s only one reason the western hemisphere continue to go into meltdown in the latter part of December, because let’s face it, celebrating Christmas has about as much to do with a baby born in a stable, as three wise men turning up to sort out the Eurozone crisis.  The acceptable face of conspicuous consumption during these coming weeks is all about getting our nearest and dearest, the youngest of our tribes, used to disappointment. Once that wrapping paper is off, and the harsh reality hits home , we all have to face the uncomfortable truth that none of us ever gets what we really want at Christmas.  What do I want?  More than anything, I want Santa Claus to give me some energy, so that I can actually manage to finish the shopping , iron a tablecloth, dress a tree as well as myself, and cook perfectly roasted potatoes, listening to my partner hyperventilate because I opened the oven door mid way.  But that’s o.k. It is a perfectly valid reason for an ‘off your face’ lunch and a belly busting dinner, and it helps the tots to get used to the fact that hype is exactly what it says on the tin, HYPE.  So stop getting in a strop about it, just hunker on down, and face facts. It HAS TO BE DONE.  It is only right and proper that we wheel out the old and disgusting relatives, so that young people get used to saggy skin and crows feet and bad temper.  We can’t all be Sheryl Crow after all. I am embracing the mistletoe with fervour, in order to embarrass as many of the young men in my household as is possible. They may avoid all attempts at bodily contact for 364 days, but this day will be mine. Ha!!! My good fortune is that all my family are post 16 now, so they already know its a crock of glitter, that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Christmas paraded across screens  and across bill boards, in songs and films.  They already know that we’ll be tipsy by one, and then fall asleep in front of the telly watching some re-run , or East Enders.  That’s true authentic.  Trousers will be undone, there will be an attempt to engage in board games by the more senior guest, and it will be down to me and the  dog to walk her home.

So , manage the to-do list bearing the above in mind, who are you trying to please? Like a lot in  modern life, we’ve been tricked into a celebration that ends up with little of the original intent .

“Let me tell you the story of a man killed by advertising.” Emile Zola started a short story about a man he called Pierre Landry, written in 1866, the message could not be more appropriate to ourselves. Pierre is blinded by the new exciting advertisements that bombard him, and decides he needs to consume the marvels that are promised within the advertisements.  He is gradually overcome by the stresses of his  consumption, and is killed by excess.  Don’t be fooled into thinking you are immune to the toxicity of the marketing men,  their craft is upon us all the time, invisibly, in the films we watch, the radio we hear , the music we play.  We all consume, but we don’t all need to die of it, like Pierre.  Often it is a dearth of spirituality that creeps upon us, as a result of a continuing engagement with the ‘latest’ , with ‘ the best’.  Wordsworth said it centuries ago,

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Like junk food can make us obese, junk thoughts and advertisements can make us moronic.  As we walk down the street our eyes scan billboards whose carefully-crafted imagery change us on a subconscious, spiritual level. We are, in a literal way, poisoned each time we see an advertisement and that is the essential danger of a consumer society based upon advertising.

 

 

Stormy weather

Storms make for heightened emotion,  windy weather bringing out the passion for play in youngsters as any teacher will testify. The storm was mellow by the time the winds reached us, so the only damage I suffered was a torn branch on a tree, now lying forlorn and neglected on the lawn, inviting enquiry from the dog.  But it is a reminder of how vulnerable we all are to weather, and how inconsequential against the power of nature. One of my very favoured occupations is watching the sea, particularly in high winds, knowing that my own two feet are firmly placed on ground.  How fisherman must experience the fear and and the glory of wind and tide.  The mixture of adrenaline with sea water salting the fight between survival and disaster.  Death defying, and life enhancing.  I would guess they are a different breed of men. It must colour the whole of being, once gripped by the drama and beauty of it.  What I have found for your delight and delectation are some paintings of sea scapes, to fire imagination.  

The Tempest Peder Balke  at the National Gallery

 

 

Getting in the mood

I am not concerned whether you are Christian, Jew or Muslim. Whether you are pagan, atheist or agnostic.  It does not worry me , how you choose to figure your life.  I only want to know you are peaceful, with whatever story you choose as the backdrop to your life. Here’s a star , for the festive season, to lighten the winter days and nights, whoever you are , wherever you live. The interesting thing about my star is this, it recycled. Just as we all are, just as all the dust and all the stuff, and all of us are recycled matter from the universe.  My star came from an illustrated drawing from Heackel, the German biologist and naturalist. I think he would have approved.

Tree time.

Somehow I tripped up over an image by a Canadian painter Robert Marchessault, and couldn’t help wanting to share my find with you. I have written before about the wonderful feelings I have around trees, and clearly, my experience is shared by this man. A painting is not a tree, but a good painting can provoke similar opportunities to fall into the sort of reverie that the natural trees themselves inspire. I was not surprised when I read his explanation about how important it is for him to paint rather than photograph, the process of viscerally creating a physical form being important to him . His awareness of the tree being both form and metaphor creates the atmosphere wherein the viewer can explore the importance of life forces within themselves, strength, flexibility, time all are embodied in these portraits of trees. Portraits is a good term, since it describes personality being a facet of the painting, and trees do have signatures as individual as our own. I particularly enjoy the image that the artist explores of the solitary tree, against a backdrop existentially bare of paraphenalia, exploring the human experience of understanding that the self is ultimately alone in the universe.

Marchessault is a well-established Canadian painter with an extensive exhibition history. His newest series of work on panel evolves out of his continued interest in the contemporary, sublime landscape. He states: “My painting can be seen as an inquiry which ultimately seeks to reveal how painted images act as a metaphor for who or what I am. The landscape paintings, which I have been making since the mid-1970s, seek to reveal my emerging understanding of the non-duality of nature. These works have gone through a range of artistic treatments with the 1990s seeing a focus on space, light, textures, atmosphere and distance. I am intrigued with the sensation of being personally diminished when experiencing great spaces. Deserts, mountains, and vast open plains make me feel that some fundamental truth is revealed by this sense of dissolution into these spaces. My landscape paintings are made from memory, not from on-site drawings or photographs. I use memory as a filtering agent to remove nonessential visual elements. When a work is successful, it has a poetry that presents some aspect of my understanding of who I am.”
Ilse Grassinger, the director of the Durham Public Art Gallery, wrote the following lines in 2009 for a group show he was in titled Arboreal.
“Robert Marchessault explores contemporary sublime landscape in paintings that repeatedly foreground a single tree, stripped of non-essential visual elements and emptied of any human presence. Poetic and meditative, these trees are the quiet centre of being and a visual invocation of human self-awareness.”

Robert Marchessault can be further researched on his own blog, full of interesting detail about how he paints, and what he is trying to achieve when he does. It has lots of detail, such as short video footage of his working studio, which is fascinating.
Furthermore, he has a number of books easily available from blurb, which he has published at extremely reasonable prices. I can’t afford a painting (I wish), but one of his collection of works will be sitting comfortably on my bookshelf soon!!Go here to buy one for a treat http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1336172
He also has a great website here http://www.sentex.net/~bmarche/and the blog link is here,http://robert-marchessault.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&max-results=31

Because I love being amongst them, sometimes I am inspired to write about them. they are a recurring theme in my poetry.

Morningness

Morning sky is spotless,
endlessly smooth azure and
unbroken in its promise.
Emerald sap is rising, dewed
shadows curve long, outlines
as sharp as creases,
mirroring winter trees, bare
but for sticky buds.
The air itself fresh
as the first day;
carrying caws of crows
alongside the drone
of engines high above.
This is as close to God
as I get;
non-believer,lost in rapture and
letting the tree take my weight.

Anne Corr

 

Like a snowflake falling on water

Here’s a poet unafraid of the ordinary, a man fixed on living his life in a straight forward manner, doing the things that were meaningful to him.  Better known in America, than here, he is acclaimed as Poet Laureate 2004 – 2006, and worked a day job in insurance for 35 years.  Familiar, and with a poetic sensibility he chooses to share, he is sometimes accused of sentimentalism, but is unafraid of that.

“If you pay attention to the ordinary world, there are all sorts of wonderful things in it,” he says. “But most of us go through the day without noticing.”

Now ain’t that the truth?

More than a Matchstick Man

When I was eleven years old I was interviewed by the local Girls High School , in order to chase a scholarship place. I walked into an imposing entrance hall,
once a grand villa owned by a rich industrialist, where a large print of a Lowry was being shown. We were asked to study it, and were later questioned on
our feelings about the painting. I remember how muted the colours were, and how bleak I felt the vision was. The day before yesterday was my mother’s 
81st birthday, and as luck would have it, our local university is showing a Lowry exhibition at its gallery. Nottingham University is a marvellously sited
campus university, and boasts facilities which it shares with the local community. One of these is the wonderful Djanogly gallery, where temporary
exhibitions are given house room, and offer excellent free opportunities to broaden the mind. Since I remember that my mother had remarked that Lowry
was a favourite of hers, all those years ago, when I was relating the occasion of the interview to her, age 11, I decided that would be her birthday treat.

It was a treat, but one that left strong, curious unsettling feelings and I was interested to find out more about the man who became one of the most popular
British painters today. An artist that has created a legacy of ‘Matchstick men, and matchstick cats and dogs’, and is studied in primary and secondary
schools across the country. He is in the British consciousness as a cherished emblem of industrial Britain, during it’s day of heavy manufacturing industry.
As I walked around the exhibition, I began to feel so much more about the man. His paintings that spring to mind are often populated with a business of
daily life, coming back from the mill, or a school playground at pick up time, and these paintings are alive with the reality of the daily round. Character
springs out from these strangely depicted people, and wonderfully drawn dogs. But the overall feeling I get from them , is his distance from them. He is an
observer, and a detached one. He is always on the outside , looking in. It feels that there is a strange acceptance by the artist, that humanity is a throng,
where life is, but that he cannot join in.
When I read about the man, he is withdrawn, private, remote. For 42 years he worked for a property company, after drifting into office work, his art being
something separate from his living. Earning a living involved Lowry traipsing the poorest streets in Manchester, day after day, taking in the stories and
environments of the people he was coming across . Hardship would have been the backdrop to Lowry’s daily experience, though his own family were
reasonably placed. His father died, leaving him to care for his bed-ridden mother for the following seven years, which cannot have been easy. “She did not
understand my painting, but she understood me and that was enough.” When she died, Lowry was left in a state in which he lacked interest, and hope. His
painting was his salvation, and he was self-aware enough to recognize his isolation, “Had I not been lonely none of my works would have happened”.
Looking at his paintings of heads, the sense of deep despair is self-evident. In these paintings, which are not portraits per se, they represent a human being,
but are not of a person, the eyes are tormented, the expressions woeful in their lack of engagement. They are horrifying in that they testify his experience of
being human. I know what this artist was seeing, when he looked on the world, and it makes me deeply sad.
The painting I was drawn to time and again, was a wonderful representation of the sea meeting the sky, an imperceptible meeting at the horizon, a painting
that identifies the nothingness of existence, but in a way that is not bleak. It is emptiness, with acceptance. It is the opposite of the pictures where he is
filling the canvas with characters and things, and soot, and grime, and smoke and bells ringing, chattering mothers. It is paradoxical, that to me, this is the
one picture that has hope within it. I left the exhibition moved, my own existence mirrored back to me in ways that unnerved me. I will be back since it
continues until February. That’s here,http://www.lakesidearts.org.uk/ Nottingham, England. Well worth a visit.

Thanks to this site, where I found pictures and bio. http://www.thelowry.com/

This is the seascape, which youmight not have identified as a Lowry. There are landscapes too, that show his interest in spaces, nature, landscape.  One that drew my eye, seemed to represent the sensuality of a reposing human body.  He was a man that saw the world very much from his own perspective, and he reinforces this perspective by imposing his view onto landscape, and even onto human faces.  It is as though he needs to feel his own existence by creating it visually.  He became concerned about whether his art would be appreciated in time, and asked time and again, “But will I live?”

His own life seems to have been poured into his art. They are one.